LIGNA
I closed my carbon books before my first desk arrived
Fisher & Paykel's Auckland mass-timber diagrid closed its carbon books at 1,089 t ahead — but 'ahead' holds under only one of three LCA conventions.
Timber Shell Structures: How a Few Centimetres of Curved Wood Learn to Span a Hall
How timber shells carry load in-plane like Mannheim's lath net and BUGA's 376 cassettes — form-finding, faceting, buckling, and building for disassembly.
Piezoelectric Materials: How a Building Learns to Feel Its Own Load
A PAZ foundation essay on piezoelectricity — from the Curies' 1880 discovery to why d33 makes it a superb structural sensor and a poor power harvester.
The Metal That Un-Remembers Damage: Shape Memory Materials, Explained
How Nitinol and shape memory alloys separate damage from deformation — the physics of self-centering seismic braces, from Buehler's 1965 patent to Assisi.
Computational Nanomechanics: Why a Material's Strength Is Grown, Not Looked Up
Why a material's strength is an emergent, atom-scale behaviour — and how architects can interrogate nano-reinforced datasheets instead of trusting them.
A Building That Cannot Be Un-Built Is Already Waste
Circular construction needs recoverable joints, not just recyclable materials. Material passports, CPR 2024/3110, and one IFC query to audit disassembly.
Show HN: High-Res Neural Cellular Automata — and what a body that heals itself already knows
cells2pixels scales Neural Cellular Automata to any resolution. Clone it, run a 12-line PyTorch NCA, and learn what self-healing patterns mean for façades.
Grasshopper's Training Economy Comes of Age: Five Spring Webinars, One Discipline Question
Five spring-2026 Rhino & Grasshopper webinars — from schneider+schumacher to AA EmTech — reveal a maturing training economy. Read it like a material.
Give Your Build Pipeline a Nervous System: CI/CD Tracing with OpenTelemetry
Step-by-step: instrument GitHub Actions with the OpenTelemetry Collector's GitHub Receiver, trace every job and step, and query the slow ones in SigNoz.
Voronoi: the pattern a body uses to spend the least material
A PAZ foundation essay on Voronoi diagrams — the geometry of nearest-neighbour packing, its Delaunay dual, and how it zones CLT, lattice infill and façades.
